The deconstruction of form as a postmodern way of narration in Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

Postmodernist fiction with the spirit of questioning dethrones the conventional supremacy of form wherein the idea of stable narration, clear-cut viewpoints, omniscient narration, transparent and objective narration, and authenticity are highlighted. Postmodernists such as Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and Lyotard have rejected the conventional tools of representation. Rationality, logicality, sensory data, intuitive recollection, and even language are not considered as reliable sources of knowledge for either ontology or epistemology. With the postmodern radical questioning of the very ground on which they exist, those parameters cannot be thought as reliable or authentic sources of knowledge. The present study shows how Calvino deconstructs the form of novel in the process of narration. The form itself becomes a slippery ground on which no stable narration can rest.